Despite his absent ego, thirst for knowledge, and seemingly affable persona, it is not easy to talk to John Maus. His logic is heady. Nonlinear tangents abound. He casually drops references to Stockhausen, Socrates, and the 12-tone compositional technique. But Maus, a Minnesota resident, understands this difficulty, or has at least become wary of it since the cultish success of his 2011 lo-fi synth-pop manifesto We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves carried him towards a humble spotlight. The 32-year-old is currently finishing a Ph.D dissertation in political philosophy; "I haven't spent much time working on new music since [Pitiless Censors] came out," he admits. He tends to get lost in the swelling of his own ideas surrounding "the thing itself"-- his go-to piece of rhetoric when referencing the dark, murky, and strangely magnetic pop he writes, records, and delivers live, for which his constant aim is "something outside of myself."

It's precisely the academic jargon Maus is perennially steeped in that can leave conversations with him a bit indecipherable, but he's learning to edit his thoughts. For example, prefacing a few ideas regarding "our culture's theoretical explanations of romantic love" as they pertain to his recently-issued rarity "Bennington": "Invariably, I start going down that road, and end up alienating people," he says, acknowledging his tendency to get a bit dense when drawing from the abstractions of aesthetic theory. "You see?" he asks, minutes later, after reaching an accidental and inevitable tangent on desire and the philosopher Jacques Lacan. "I feel ridiculous going on about this."

But Maus' unguarded meanderings, both intellectual and personal, are also what make it so very impossible to cut a conversation with him off-- even if it goes on for two hours and thirty-four minutes, as ours did over the phone last month. On the occasion of his excellent new Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material, the singer spoke to us about his artistic development over the past decade, he and Ariel Pink's early-2000s music blog, and why he's ruled out the possibilities of romantic love or earning a living from his art.

"Anytime you can muster the fury to actually write in the
face of the impossibility of writing, that's an achievement."

Pitchfork: Collection of Rarities includes songs from 1999 through 2010. What was it like revisiting your own material like that?

John Maus: It was really something else. You listen to a song you did 10 years ago and it takes you right back to that time and place-- everything you had then and don't have now, and everything you have now and didn't have then. Above all, it's an encounter with audacity, which is something people in their early 20s have much more of than people going on 32. It was an encounter with that dare. I was teary-eyed at times [working on the album], thinking about when I was 24 and how intense everything seemed to be. I've always been hard on myself, and listening to some of those songs again, I thought: "Why was I so hard on myself?"

I hope [the album] didn't disappoint you too much. I'm really flattered that [Ribbon Music] wanted to put it out. It's just a collection of tracks that weren't on any of the albums. And there was probably a reason they weren't. But then I came to find that some of those tracks are people's favorites, and who am I to tell somebody, "No, you can't put that out." I mean, my heroes, Nirvana, put out Incesticide. It's a John Maus version of that.

Pitchfork: Where were you at in 1999, when you wrote the collection's earliest track, "Fish With Broken Dreams"?

JM: That track is from before I came under the spell of [former bandmate] Ariel [Pink] and the things we started doing together. It was a strange experience, being from the middle of nowhere and then finding myself in L.A. amidst all different types of people-- the anxieties we all experience at that age, the insecurities, the ambition. I was pretty insecure and afraid of people. I was also working with a musical palette that was perhaps more uniquely my own.

In 1999, I had started listening to the classical guys, the early minimalist stuff. I had some idea that that was the road I was going down-- orchestrated arrangements you might hear in older kinds of music. But I decided all that stuff wasn't native to pop or punk rock, and that as much as I love 70s progressive music, all that was a digression; we don't need [the Beatles'] "Revolution 9" if we have Stockhausen. So I started to interrogate the question: "What is pop capable of?"

"With 'I Don't Eat Human Beings', I wanted to proclaim
a rejection of cannibalism. I'm against eating
a human being alive-- I don't do it."

Pitchfork: Are there any tracks on this new collection that have really strong memories attached to them for you?

JM: There's one from 2010 called "Angel of the Night". On [Pitiless Censors], I felt like I didn't achieve what I had set out to achieve. I had a breakdown around it. I found myself without an anchor and I ended up in a strange place I hadn't found myself in before, amidst chaos. That track comes out of that. It's unusual with respect to how I've made songs in the past. It was a spontaneous overflow.

Pitchfork: Did you record that song in the middle of the night?

JM: Yeah. I've gotten into a strange space living [in Minnesota] the last two years. I don't see people too often. I don't romanticize it-- I plan on getting out of here. But I think it has brought something novel [to the music], like I'm transmitting what it all finally came to in the song. It's a fitting bookend to everything I've done. Going back to these songs, I could hear that I tried as hard as I could with each one, and I've always believed that that counts for something.

Pitchfork: The first track I heard from the LP was "Mental Breakdown" from 2004. Can you tell me more about that song?

JM: I've always struggled with sleep and motivation and crazy feelings and emotions that just seem overwhelming. So I tried to share a little bit of that cruel insanity with people. I wrote that in 2003, when I was living with Ariel; he was doing Worn Copy, and I was doing that in my room.

Sometimes you're listening and you're just like, "What the fuck is going on?" I envy the shit out of people that believe [life is] a certain way. I don't know what the fuck is going on. The best wager to me has always been the Socratic one. You ask people who seem to think it's a certain way why they think that. And invariably you find that they come up against foundational leaps of faith-- axioms that their whole certain way presupposes. I hate to talk about philosophy, but the shit I read in there makes a lot of sense-- that we're alienated from our true communal nature. I have no idea what the hell is going on in the world, in my life, in what anything means, or what I'm supposed to do. And that's kind of what that's about.

Pitchfork: The last song on the record, "I Don't Eat Human Beings", has a new-age feel. Were you listening to that kind of music when you wrote that song?

JM: Yeah. I definitely am interested in soundtracks that one might associate with fantasy or sci-fi-- they tend to be rich with musical ideas. I don't know who eats human beings, but you might imagine some kind of party of aristocrats-- real rich people-- sitting around a dinner table and eating a human being alive. I'm against eating a human being alive-- I don't do it. Somebody might make cannibalism jokes and laugh it off like it's nothing. I don't agree with that. I wanted to proclaim a rejection of cannibalism.

Photo by Mark Blower

Pitchfork: "Bennington" is so immediately catchy and earnest. It's a real love song. Where did that one come from?

JM: It's a true song. I'm sure a handful of people can relate to that experience of having some kind of romantic encounter-- the event of love-- which they just can't shake. They take it with them, despite their own desire, and it continually haunts them, and there's nothing to be done about it. That's a true rarity. It's even rarer than stumbling across a good musical idea, to come across somebody who really surprises you and opens up that strange dynamic that's involved in romantic love. That's an exceptional thing. There's really not much in life that's as violent or traumatic as an encounter like that.

Pitchfork: Do you think all love is traumatic?

JM: I was referring to the abstract, theoretical explanations for romantic love in our culture. What it is, and what it means. Invariably, I start going down that road, and end up alienating people. I could go down that path, but it'll get murky.

Pitchfork: OK.

JM: The best explanation I'm aware of is the psychoanalytic account. In our culture, the Oedipal drama succeeds in making us assume either a male or female sexual position. Certainly this is an ancient construct that's rapidly coming apart. The categories of woman and man are too rigid. They're going to give way to new forces. They already have, to a degree, but for most of us, this drama held sway, and we assumed our positions. I think about the graph of desire. [The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan]'s famous graph of desire was this idea…

You see? I feel ridiculous going on about this. But the man believes the woman's got the hidden secret. That's a rare thing. You meet lots of people, and they're all deserved of love, of course, but romantic love involves some kind of supplement: she has the secret. That's what's desired. It's an event, and the situation continues on under the sign of that encounter. Various people have put forth that love is the scene of two, that it's not about unity, it's about two absolutely disjunct positions encountering each other. So here, even with something like sex-- what [that song's] about-- you could never become one.

Pitchfork: Right. I feel like most of your songs aren't so open about love.

JM: Well, there's love and there's romantic love. The Greeks had different words for different kinds of love. And we just got "love." I don't know what you would call the other kinds-- maybe brotherly love, Christian love, the love of Saint Francis, love of everyone and everything. Then there's romantic love, which, by and large, is a pain in the ass, a kind of trauma.

But in terms of love and romance, it just seems less and less like that's ever going to happen again, or be a possibility for me. I feel like I've irrevocably lost so much. You want the surprise, but it gets harder and harder to find, whether we're talking about romance, or somebody else's song, or your own song. You want the thing that interrupts your regular comings-and-goings. This is all boring nonsense, of course.

"I wouldn't claim that my music is new, but generally speaking, pop music begs for some kind of radical new way of talking about it."

Pitchfork: The title of your last album was a reference to this idea that we have to censor ourselves from technologies that distract and inhibit us from creating.

JM: It's a very teenage idea-- this idea that thought is ruined when we give over to television shows and glossy magazines and what they are telling us to do. The alternative, I believe, in is pitiless censorship. Because we owe each other the best effort we can to see one another without that mediation.

Pitchfork: From 1999 to 2010, the amount of media that's come to saturate peoples' lives has increased beyond belief.

JM: It defies anything you'd expect. In my formative years, [the cloud] just didn't exist. I didn't have a single copy of one of the songs on the album, ["Lost"], but I managed to track down somebody who had downloaded it from the website I had with Ariel back in 2003.

Pitchfork: When you were recording with Ariel in the early 2000s, did you post tracks to that website right after recording?

JM: I'd get stuff on there pretty promptly. It was just the beginning. I remember that I heard the word "blog" for the first time when I was putting that website together. It was called Demonstration Bootleg.

It's something that begs for thought, isn't it? This whole crazy situation. Ariel's music really speaks to this moment in that it draws on so many different things, and the narrative gets so confused. The Retromania explanation has never made sense to me; it's superficial dismissal. The [music] narrative as it was presented to me growing up just doesn't exist anymore.

Ariel actually wrote the lyrics to "The Law" [from Collection of Rarities]. He isn't credited because neither of us care enough about any "official" credit. The story behind the lyrics to "Big Dumb Man" involve Ariel as well. One of the few friendly fights we had, back in those days, involved the transition in his musical stylings from Underground (1999) and Vital Pink (1999) to The Doldrums (2000). I sent him an email around that time lamenting his abandonment of certain musical ideas, and he was pissed and sent me an email which would become, more or less, the lyrics to ["Big Dumb Man"].

Pitchfork: Are there any other particular milestones you can recall as far as the trajectory of this new collection is concerned?

JM: I worked in a way that to some people might seem backwards, by subtracting anything that I thought was superfluous-- like using the 12-tone compositional technique-- to get to the pure question mark of the great pop song. I always suspected that you arrive at groundbreaking, radical novelty by pursuing the question mark itself. I don't think I've exactly achieved that yet, but I hope to. Every time you sit down and finish a thing, it's a milestone. Anytime you can muster the fury to actually write in the face of the impossibility of writing, that's an achievement.

I might have regarded a lot of these [songs] as miscarriages, but looking back, they had pure intention behind them. I'm hoping that counts for something. Just the willingness to fail, the willingness to throw the dice. I hope I never abandon that sense that I encountered something outside of myself-- something that didn't fall within what can easily be done. One guy [writing about Pitiless Censors] suggested that the best way to write is precisely to operate within the space you're comfortable in. But I put all my eggs in the other basket.

Something gets lost when I'm talking about it with people because I'm steeped in aesthetic theory, so I tend to bring in my own amateurish way of baring a little bit-- when, in practice, I'm not thinking about that when I'm working over the keyboard, or musing over musical ideas in my head. But when discussing it, we want to have some new thought about this new music. I wouldn't claim that my music is new, but generally speaking pop music begs for some kind of radical new way of talking about it.

Pitchfork: Since your last album, your visibility as a musician has increased. Has anything changed in terms of how you work?

JM: It certainly will, inevitably. The shows have gotten a little bit bigger, and I'm concerned about that. I'm just not sure that whatever it was I was doing can really be translated [to big stages]. I get the impression a lot of people are disappointed by the shows, and that's the last thing anybody wants to put on somebody else. You want to do something that is effective and productive with the live situation, and if I'm failing at that because I'm not equipped for larger spaces, then I owe it to everybody to make these changes.

Pitchfork: The last time I saw you was at a late-night, word-of-mouth show at the Market Hotel in January 2011.

JM: Yeah, in New York. I get real nervous. I don't mean to sound like a baby, but I really want to do something with those shows. I really try as hard as I can. When that's lost on folks, I just feel terrible about that. If people can't see my face, if they can't see my sweat beads or at least that I'm struggling, that I'm not just pretending or going through the motions, then who can blame them for thinking that it's some kind of ridiculous piss-take? I swear, that's not what it is. I just think if you're that many hundred feet away from me, it's hard to see what it's about.

"Musical acts that feign enthusiasm for what they're doing--
the guitarist who jumps up and down, like it's choreographed--
are so transparently vacuous."

Pitchfork: What were your live shows like in the early 2000s?

JM: It was just 20 people in a room-- sometimes they just stood with their arms folded, staring at me in disgust. Especially early on, because I collaborated with Panda Bear-- and it's safe to say that our music is a little bit different. But that would get attached to the promo, and people would turn up thinking I was gonna do something that sounded like [Panda Bear], and be tremendously disappointed when I didn't.

I just did a show in Madrid last year where they threw beer at me, and booed me off stage. I was a little bit surprised by that, because I thought that was something people were used to now-- the guy that's up there with his Macintosh. But I think of the musical acts that feign enthusiasm for what they're doing, and it's so transparently vacuous. The guitarist who jumps up and down, like it's choreographed. That's something I absolutely don't want to succumb to.

With live music-- especially with punk rock, or pop music-- what is it? What is it for? What is it about? What are we going to see? Is it purely about sound? Is it purely about the instrumental performance? If they can pull it off tight, or recreate the album exactly? Or is it about being with others? Or is it about interrogating what the thing itself could be, or might be, or is capable of becoming?

I play with Dan Deacon from time to time, and he's a great guy. He really has interesting ideas that draw a lot from experiments that have been done in explicitly experimental music, like Cage. He really interrogates the line between audience and performer and community. I might be putting words in his mouth, but I think he recognized something in my performance that it was similar. Of course, it's not nearly as radical as what he's doing.

Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material cover:

Pitchfork: What was your initial reaction when you discovered Maus Space, the fan-run message board?

JM: I can't explain how humbling it is-- how awesome it is that people have engaged with the work. Some artists really see the whole thing-- the music videos, the packaging-- as part of a totality. I've never been good at the visual stuff. To see these people making videos and pictures-- they're always doing interesting things that are much better than anything I could do myself. It's a constellation-- a whole thing that we put together. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I really see it this way: We're all engaged in constructing this thing. Even myself, with writing [music], as a general rule I'm looking for something that surprises me, that doesn't fall within what's easy for me.

Watch a fan-made video for "Quantum Leap":

Embedded content is unavailable.

Pitchfork: Do you plan on continuing to pursue academia more after you've finished your Ph.D?

JM: I hope I always make music, and I plan on doing that. But I also plan on getting a regular job. Maybe this is blasphemy to say, but I feel like [music] is not meant to be something that earning your keep depends on because it cheapens it and it will force you into making decisions in the interest of earning your keep, as opposed to the interest of the thing itself. And that's a bad position to be in. It seems to me that the best work I've done-- and maybe this is something other people can identify with-- was because it was an end in itself. It was something other than making ends meet, it was an escape from all that.